Pangs of Joy, Bursts of Sadness, and Horses: In Other Words, October

There’s snow on the pumpkins. The water in the birdbath, which I neglected to empty yesterday when we got home from our last fall excursion trail ride, has frozen.

It’s Halloween.

Before the snow came, we accomplished the fall excursion checklist: from apple picking

to trail rides

to pumpkin patches.

We didn’t get anywhere near enough of “October’s bright blue weather,” but that made the days we did get it even more delightful. It was a weird, late fall, with a surge of absurdly warm weather in early October, followed by a lot of rain, but we carpe-d the freakin’ diem out of all the days I took off from work when there was halfway decent weather.

I know it’s not going to last long, but today’s intermittent snow showers are a powerful door-slam to my favorite month of the year.

During this strange October, the month of Mike’s birthday, Angelic Daughter has finally come around to having a few good cries over her Dad. For the first few years, I think she was just trying to wrap her head around his absence, and the impossible idea that he wasn’t coming back. How could that be? What’s “the next world?” Where did he go?

Now, it has truly sunk in, I think, and the tears are coming. When she was in elementary and middle school, she used to have regular “crying time,” just to defuse the stress of enduring a school day that was unforgiving of intense sensory experiences and the need for extra processing time. But she hasn’t engaged in regular crying time for several years, including the confusing ones just following Mike’s death.

But now, crying time is back.

I’ve told her it’s good for her, these sob sessions – that I don’t think she’s taken enough time to really feel and acknowledge her grief. We’ve talked not only about Mike’s last words to her (“remember, Dad’s love never ends,)” and that Dad wouldn’t want her to be sad all the time.

But recently we’ve also talked about how losing someone so important to you changes you, forever. That grief doesn’t go away, it just walks along with you, inside you, along with your memories, both good and challenging. I can see her thinking about these ideas, and watch her face as she solemnly processes them. She looks so contemplative and sad, in such an adult way, that I get bursts of pain in the middle of my chest just looking at her. But I do think it’s necessary for her to wade her way through these feelings until she fully understands and accepts the complicated shape of her life without Dad.

In the meantime, she has the horses. Her weekly arena rides at the therapeutic riding barn are fun, but she truly craves the fall trail rides. The 45 minute one is always on the same route on the same trail, but it doesn’t matter–it’s peaceful and relaxing.

The two-hour one through the southern Kettle Moraine, every minute of which was punctuated by the loud, incessant sound of gunfire from a nearby shooting range, was not–for me, anyway. Hunting season would be starting soon. How come the group from the other stable got to wear bright orange vests? Where’s our vests? We won’t be going back there.

But we will go back in the spring and summer to whatever trail riding stable we can find, even if it’s a long drive into Wisconsin, just to have that sense of peace and comfort. And fall will come again. Even if it’s too hot, or too rainy, at some point the trees must change and the leaves must fall. And the snow will come, even if it doesn’t stick, in this foreboding El Niño year.

Sitting at my desk working on my company’s required loaner laptop this past month, I found myself looking up and seeing the blue sky and changing leaves out the window on those rare bright blue days, and then back to the picture of Mike that sits in the desk’s hutch. I felt a sudden, intense joy/sadness that I can only describe as a “pang.” I was simultaneously elated at the beauty of the day, and heartbroken that Mike wasn’t here to enjoy it with us.

But that’s what grief feels like.

And just in time for the trick-or-treaters (the handful that we usually get, probably fewer this year), the weather has gone from this

to this:

and back again. And again.

My weather app tells me a winter weather advisory has just been issued. One to three inches expected, gusty winds, poor visibility, hazardous driving.

Goodby, October.

Living with pangs of joy and bursts of sadness, I remain,

your up and down, inside out, sad-to-see-October-go-but-had-the-presence-of-mind-to-make-a-pot-of-clam-chowder-for-dinner on this blue/grey, snowy/sunny, gusty, happy-sad day,

Ridiculouswoman